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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vikingkingq" data-source="post: 9239953" data-attributes="member: 66208">As someone who likes Lovecraft and Howard, I don't have a problem acknowledging that these two dudes were pretty weirdly racist even for their time. Lovecraft's issues are better known, but Howard's beliefs are quite distinctive in their own way. While we can certainly detect a strong influence of Madison Grant's eugenic theories of prehistory and the fin-de-siècle Yellow Peril anxieties about the seemingly effeminizing influence of modern industrial civilization in Howard's writings, REH combines these tendencies with something of Ibn Khaldun's theories about historical cycles of conquest and decline due to the tension between nomadic purity and urban decadence, which is a bit unusual for a West Texan of the 1930s. What I find fascinatingly contradictory about his beliefs is that despite the fact that Howard makes the superiority of the barbarian absolutely central to his writings, he also shares a strong belief in the inferiority of nonwhite people especially manifested through an idiosyncratic obsession with devolution. Over and over again in his writings, there is this idea that evolution can go backwards and transform humans back into apes or ape-hybrids. So Ibn Khaldun's cycles of civilization become cycles of biology, so that when human civilizations fall to the barbarian, they inevitably regress into an animal state of nature until the pendulum eventually swings back in the other direction. While Lovecraft's obsessions with human-fish hybrids were a more unidirectional allegory for interracial relationships and didn't have Howard's admiration for the barbarian and the natural world, I think we can see something of why they vibed together in that.</blockquote>

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